Last week, Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, charged in an interview with the New York Times that Donald Trump was treating his office like “a reality show,” with reckless threats toward other countries that could set the nation “on the path to World War III.”Corker said he was concerned about Trump: “He would have to concern anyone who cares about our nation.” Corker added that “the vast majority of our caucus understands what we‘re dealing with

Two controversial cases – each involving the police and the top spy agency -- illustrate how Korea’s powerful agencies, including law-enforcement authorities, are swayed by domestic politics. The first case concerns the death of an activist farmer who died about one year ago after being hit by a police water cannon. The turn of events surrounding Baek Nam-ki is truly dramatic.Baek, then 68, fell unconscious in November 2015 after he was directly hit by a police water cannon during a violent anti

When the South African government attempted to amend its laws in 1997 to avail itself of affordable generic medicines for the treatment of HIV/AIDS, the full legal might of the global pharmaceutical industry bore down on the country, delaying implementation and extracting a high human cost. South Africa eventually won its case, but the government learned its lesson: it did not try again to put its citizens’ health and wellbeing into its own hands by challenging the conventional global intellectu

Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, has called early elections for Oct. 22 to seek to improve his Liberal Democratic Party’s position in the parliament. Americans have a tendency not to pay too close attention to what happens in Japan. This is partly because its society and, thus, its politics are complex and hard to understand. Second, Japan usually, at least superficially, seems to follow US policy lines in foreign affairs without America having to exert too much pressure on its leaders.It wou

For Asia and the rest of the world, what the US president does and says on overseas summit trips counts. Such will be the same with Donald Trump’s first swing through Asia as president scheduled for early next month. Trump and his aides have not yet outlined anything like Barack Obama’s “Pivot to Asia” vision, but his engagements with major Asian leaders will certainly set the direction for US policy on the region which will last at least three more years.So many will closely follow his what is

Just as his critics warned, President Trump is turning out to be unfit for his job, perhaps dangerously so. That’s a harsh judgment, but it’s no longer coming from the president’s opponents. It’s coming from leading members of his own party.“We could be heading toward World War III with the kind of comments he’s making,” the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Bob Corker, said last week. Corker, who endorsed Trump during the presidential campaign, was only saying in public what o

In Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, mammoth hurricanes have left behind a colossal amount of work. The cleanup and reconstruction efforts are going to take years. That means a severe demand for salvage and demolition crews, roofers, carpenters, drywall installers, painters, plumbers and workers in all manner of other trades and skills.And if recent history tells us anything, much of this demand will be met by immigrants -- migrant laborers, many of them highly skilled, and man

All the noise surrounding former President Park Geun-hye’s trial reflects some of the problems deeply entrenched in our society. The first one is the tendency of prosecutors to exploit their authority to seek detention of criminal suspects. Korean prosecutors investigating high-profile cases tend to link the success or failure of their work to whether they acquire court-issued arrest warrants for major suspects. This time, as the first arrest warrant for Park that was issued six months ago has e